Chicken Noodle Soup

It’s soup season! Cold nights curled up on the sofa call for a lovely big bowl of steaming soup. After I made my Chinese-style roasted ham, I used the resulting stock to make some rather delicious chicken noodle soup. I usually have very limited success with noodles for some reason – but in this instance, I nailed it (if I do say so myself).

It was really pretty simply. I removed the star anise from the stock and mashed up the soft cloves of garlic and ginger into a paste, which I then returned to the liquid. After thinly slicing some boneless chicken thighs (I find these much tastier than chicken breasts), I added them to the pot to boil in the stock. In the meantime, I sliced some pak choi and oyster mushrooms, which also got added to the pot once the chicken was cooked. Seeing as I had a tin of bamboo shoots in the cupboard, they got thrown in for good measure too, along with some soy and oyster sauce for flavouring (as the stock was already quite salty from the ham, it’s important not to over do it on the soy front). Towards the end of cooking, I added some fine egg noodles, which only took a few minutes to soften in the broth.

Usually I need something with soup for lunch, like a sandwich or buttered roll. But this was so filling, it did just the trick and kept me going until dinner time: